“One can speak of myths; the myth itself leaves the claim to truth in suspense. A principle of art also and especially for Kunisch’s works: to remain in suspense.”
by Martin Mezger, art critic and feuilletonist
The following are excerpts from a commentary by Martin ezger, art critic and feuilletonist.
” […] There is no doubt that the artist Matthias Kunisch is the Minotaur—with the not insignificant peculiarity that he is also his own labyrinth. Anyone wants to trace Matthias Kunisch as an artist, to grasp the essence of his art at its core, to conceptualize it, is lured by Matthias Kunisch into a systematic labyrinth of proliferating anecdotes. As the orgasm is the small death, “the anecdote is the small myth,” says Kunisch. After the climax—respectively the punchline—one is exhausted and can no longer find the exit. That the artist strategically protects himself from “grasping”—the definitive definition, the great death, the slain Minotaur—is his right. He maintains in narrative suspension what (and that) his art may be. Or may not be.
LIFEWORLD (LEBENSWELT)
Whoever—like Kunisch—postulates, “There is no art that does not have a personal reason,” must harbor these reasons in that anecdotal labyrinth narrative that allows his art to hover. The term “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) defined philosophically by Husserl as a pre-existing system of reference and everyday meaning (the subjective world of a person’s everyday expereinces and the foundation to perceiv and understand the world around us), is therefore relevant for Kunisch in a double sense. As a narrator of artistic occasions, he transforms even the most alienating foreign into the familiar, the uncommon into the ordinary. The jovial-noncommittal authority of a university professor, the bureaucratic arbitrariness that deprived him of a study place at the Stuttgart Art Academy, the coincidence that provided him with one in Vienna, previously the absurdities of a discontinued school and winding educational career: as described, they acquire an undertone of Schilda, of foolish, laughably evil civic pranks, suspended with a humor that makes them manageable, small and limited, clumsy and personal.
Kunisch also possesses a reverse transformative ability, which, for example, allows the familiar small-town atmosphere of Esslingen am Neckar to grow into a small world theater of mythologies. The sets and personnel of the city- and social-space Kunisch-habitat are not simply what they are, but become statements that say what they are—according to the definition of the mythical in Roland Barthes’ book “Mythologies” (“Myths of Everyday Life”). According to Barthes, any random object (and person) can become a myth through this shift into the symbolic. A director of the Esslingen State Theatre who couldn’t even appreciate the original walking stick carved by Matthias Kunisch for Friedrich Hölderlin as a joke, let alone recognize it in its original seriousness; the heiress from a formerly great Esslingen industrial family, who takes her crumbling empire of abandoned factory buildings out of time, as it were, and assigns the dusty-light Hades-Olympus to the artist as a studio and housing; the Wilhelminian-style villa as a family renovation and investment project; the carving school in Michelstadt in the Odenwald as a “discovery” on the existential and self-searching odyssey of young Kunisch; the older (and recognized) Esslinger artist colleague as a guide: In Kunisch’s anecdotal cosmos, they appear as if punched out from reality, separated from the lifeworld inventory by a hardly noticeable crack; similar to some art projects that were proposed to Kunisch or realized by him—of course, with deliberate alienation: for example, a Vaporetto station in Esslingen’s “Little Venice,” a canal so named in local jargon; or the freighter Diotima in the Hölderlin lock with the Café Hyperion in the guardhouse; or the plaster bust of the 75-year-old Mozart, who was declared dead at 35, lived undercover ever since, and is now planning a revolutionary opera of freedom with the young Georg Büchner.
All these objects, roles and figures of life as well as art are heterogeneous elements that could tell an entirely different – mythical – story. But for now, they are only partially chained to the plot, only incompletely connected. For the time being they remain in a labyrinthine disarray.
The same applies even more so to the familial circumstances into which Matthias Kunisch was born on July 26, 1961. The date here deceives with an incomplete fact. For, already a year before, a son was born to the parents who, according to the memory—or retroprojection?—of his brother should carry the same name. He died still during the home birth; the surviving Matthias has often visited the child’s grave. A memorable identity in duplicity.
Moreover, the constellation of the Kunisch family lineage is a tapestry woven with disparate threads: a Jewish great-grandfather, a lineage from Brno of architects, freethinkers, and a father emerging from this environment who, after expulsion and a death-march-like escape from his Moravian homeland, found solace in Württemberg and submitted to the prevailing spiritual pietism for the sake of matrimony. From the maternal side, the devout of the land join the tableau: the Universal Reconcilers, recognizing no human boundary to the Lord’s work of salvation; God-fearers of every shade within an, ever-quarreling and factional community; and not least, a zealously proselytizing grandfather who made Nazi files vanish in fire after the war.
Up until his early twenties, Matthias Kunisch was shaped by the fundamentally revealed, fundamentally powerful Word, burdened by the weight of original sin and the uncertainty between merciless predestination and the election of grace. For him, the escape from this non self-inflected immaturity was to turn the tables: If the Word did not offer the certainty it promised, Kunisch declared it a complete myth. This liberation carries less the hallmarks of emancipation than of an illustration that renders its subjects depictable, narratable, and thus manageable.
One can speak of myths; the myth itself leaves the claim to truth in suspense. A principle of art also and especially for Kunisch’s works: to remain in suspense.
Beyond all psychologizing (or worse), Kunisch’s family history makes its excellent contribution to that stockpile of heterogeneous elements that, from their labyrinthine entanglements, could be sorted into a mythological narrative – should this be the artist’s intention.
His labyrinth is an ambivalent place: a shelter and enclosure, but also a prison and darkness. The escape would be equally ambivalent: liberation, but fraught with risks. Of course, the mythological method of finding one’s way out of the labyrinth is well-known: Ariadne’s thread. The obvious risk here is that the thread might break, creating a gap in the markings for the way back. The image of the broken thread became a symbol of postmodern confusion in the 1980s, representing a sense of loss of guiding progress and historical linearity. The risk is greater if the thread does not break: that of inescapable bondage. One is led on a leash, subject to total control, perpetually online. Liberation from the labyrinth ends in new unfreedom. The myth also captures this risk, although disguised in the image of the battle of the sexes: Theseus, to whom the lovestruck Ariadne gave the thread so that he could kill the Minotaur and escape the labyrinth, abandons his savior on a deserted island to break the bondage when he finds no joy in it after his escape.
Similarly, the two risks intertwine—said without playful irony—in Matthias Kunisch’s life. The thread broke five times, five relationships with women shattered, five promising paths of orienting love turned back into the inescapable labyrinth. Tragic entanglements brought the determining power of the myth into reality for Matthias Kunisch: the death of one of his two sons from a rare incurable disease, the ultimately false prophecy that he would never be able to work artistically again, and the reality of having to keep ones head above water with devastating back-breaking work for the time being, because the prolonged care of his terminally ill child had actually catapulted the artist Matthias Kunisch out of the schedules and contact directories of the art world.
All these life events would be nobody’s concern if Kunisch did not transform them into artistic practice: not for compensatory purposes, not to provoke empathetic or psychological interpretation, but as structure. The nature of life experience make them broken or wrecked. […]”